


Boreas and Orithyia

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Jonsaexchange, The Long Night, mention of past abortion, mentions of past rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-08 04:04:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11638545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: Honor, at least, he thinks ashamed and full of his own rotten grief, wounds deeper than love. The dead shatter, again, they fall into the snow and the snow will melt with the True Spring and the Endless Summer.





	Boreas and Orithyia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



_‘…and she never saw another summer, she died in the long winter.’_

_*     *     *_

_‘What is honor compared to a woman’s love.’_ A man with no name and a black cloak asked him once, an old man who died before Winter ever truly began.

 

At the end of it all even Ned Stark did not choose honor.

 

In the end he’s never really been Ned Stark’s son because Ned Stark chose love before they took his head.

 

He chose honor and was stabbed by a child, what else was left for him to follow after his heart no longer beat or when he returned from the dark, he wonders sometimes.

 

_*     *     *_

 

She can still recount the tales of how her family came to die, one by one.

 

The violation of her brother’s body as amusement: _the king in the north! The king in the north!_ And the laughter of Freys.

 

Her mother floating; an unrecognizable ruin in the water she imagines has fallen apart in the riverbed. 

 

She still sees her father’s legs twitch and Rickon fall like a sparrow, she can no longer remember a time when she did not.

 

_*     *     *_

 

She wears a mask over her truest face that he can no more ask her to remove than he can ask for her bones or the color of her eyes or the fingers of her fine white hands.

 

He wears a skin over himself that makes him appear a man and he may take pains to hide the stitches but rents in the shape of who he used to be reveal the hide and fur of a pale winter beast.

 

_*     *     *_

_'In Summer he’s still a King but in Winter he was something to be feared.'_

 

_The children feign sleep in their beds to hide from the ghosts that come with the snow._

_*     *     *_

 

 

He’s become again too much like her father, his face is always of late pulled up around some quiet sadness or a coward’s acceptance of a bastard's fate. She hates him for wanting nothing after so much has been taken from them.

 

He wants no crown, or title, no keep, or wife. He wants a battle but they’ve already won. He'll never admit how much he misses the killing field and a naked sword in his hand.

 

 _“We’ve not won a thing.”_ He'd told her. He’d held her chin in a hand too harsh and spoken words she’d found she already knew.

 

He does his best to forget the truth that has yet to find them.

 

Winter, yes. It's come.

 

But he's a man who's remembered she's a woman and that winter can be so cold.

 

_*     *     *_

_'She was colder in Spring, like a memory of the winter wind they’d all thought they’d never feel again.'_

 

_*     *     *_

 

There’s a battle still to come.

 

She knows that it's what he’s still living for. It's the only thing he’s yearned for in the quiet, flameless night when the snows have retreated.

 

They've won nothing. The dead no longer rise.

 

But she knows what he knows, the dead, like him, are waiting to feel alive again.

 

_*     *     *_

 

In the new peace she sharpens herself to a finer edge, the implacable dignity of her stance belaying her title, _Wardeness of the North_.

 

She is a fortress prepared for a siege that would try to stake claim on her body. Her dreams are beholden to a fear that one day another man, or monster, will come to do just that.

 

The fear she will not show discomfits him when he sits beside her on the half-pace during suppers, he can not guess what she would do if frightened badly enough, an unpredictable woman is more dangerous than a hungry beast.

 

_*     *     *_

_‘…_ _and the man was devoured by his own hounds,_ ’ She hears the tale told through Winter town.

 

 

It sounds like a tale to be whispered by an old woman in a child's nursery to frighten babes, perhaps once day it will be.

 

_*     *     *_

 

 

There is violence in her brother that has not been quelled. There is rage inside of her that has not burned out.

 

She does not dwell on her brother-cousin, only on what’s become of herself.

 

Something has been torn open and left unmended in her, like her honorable father and lady mother she is wounded, she is dead. She lives still, though. She can walk and speak and smile but she is a dead as the rest sometimes.

 

Her father was the second son of a burned father and brother to the dead. Her mother was a girl born in a southern spring given to a Northern stranger to birth babes, a woman who suffered the indignity when her husband brought another’s babe home.

 

Jon is dead too.

 

Something’s changed and was left worse inside of them, like the dead king who’d loved a dead girl and the queen who loved only her children, or the warrior who grew fat and lonely under his crown and a prize of the realm who turned sour like wine under her velvet gowns.

 

But, they are not the same as those kind of dead but neither have they truly survived what they thought they once wanted. Stories of brave noble knights protecting the realm died with him by knife and the cold and the dark and hope darkened like shut eyes in her by the breaking of her will and her interest in surviving the night.

 

Winter has taken her hate and taken his shame and turned them to things that have use.

_‘…and the man screamed for a night and day as the hounds chewed him to the bone.’_

 

It's a story she's heard before.

_*     *     *_

 

They tell more tales in hovels and holes, by hearths and warm stables: _‘He mounted the beast, a dragonrider. Like calls to like.’_

A shadow fell over the yard and she wondered if he was above, in it, if he could see all the North.

 

It might be a song she might have known the words too once.

_*     *     *_

Power is a broad winged thing, scorched stone and a bestial scream, a thing one might imagine coming from the dark if the dark was not an empty barren space he remembers daily.

 

_*     *     *_

 

She’d hid amongst the stone of the broken tower, not wanting to greet the host that has came.

 

She did, pride curtailed by will and curtsied low tasting ash in her throat.

 

A Silver Queen and her beastly children came, they took her brother, who was not her brother, they fought the dead and many died and came back with only two beasts.

 

_*     *     *_

 

 

He’d flinched under her hands, the softness of them on the rough tangle of his beard in the dark of the crypts after he'd come back from  battle that was meant to be the last.

 

“That is where I would have put your effigy. Next to Robb and my Father. It would have been empty anyway.”

 

He’d left in the night on a dragon and for more moons than he’s thought to count she’d kept his Northern peace while the corpse field she carried inside of her turned to rot, then to bone and finally to dust.

 

And, while he’s been so far from Winterfell she’s stopped flinching.

 

Her hands are cold.

 

Her mouth startles him and her eyes are like cold iron between his lungs, he's fled from her only to return and turn away from her a second time.

 

"Sansa, don-..."

 

But, she's already fallen away from where his arms might have held her if only she'd been warmer, she's already a shadow in the crypts returning to the world above made of stone and fire and oaths he wished he'd never meant to keep.

 

_*     *     *_

 

_‘What is the distance of a kingdom to a man who might fly dragons, or a woman?’_

 

He will be called King, and also Consort.

 

His once-sister scoffs and calls it sordid, indeed. He’s tried to avoid her ire with a fortnight of silence following the missive from the Southern Queen, the Mother of Dragons.

 

She rises from the table of hall and tells him to stop calling her _‘sister.’_

_*     *     *_

 

In the South, a woman born from a house thought dead rules an entire world, or near enough of such a thing that it does not matter who holds more men or land.

 

In the North, a woman whose only kin are no longer truly that sits beside a fire that’s already gone out, the hearth is cold but she no longer feels it.

 

_*     *     *_

 

The Queen of the Seven Kingdoms came to his bed.

 

He had not wanted to refuse, so he did not. It’d only been a necessary thing like all the other necessary things he’s had to do.

 

He’d gone to her bed and they’d gone to war together after against dead men and the dark.

 

If he’d enjoyed it, who could fault him for such an act before raising his sword in an effort that might take from him his life?

 

The Silver Queen is not without guile but she is, at least, without the deceptions another might force upon him.

 

 

_*     *     *_

 

“The Vale will be a loyal vassal, for your Queen’s reign.” The girl who used to be his sister, of near enough, tells him such a thing without a wasted glance or touch.

 

A vassal he did not secure himself. The Stormborn Queen does not like how well or how fast the last Stark moves to conquer and to kill.

 

It is no longer Winter but Spring is slow to start, children are still lean and babes still go hungry.

 

“Lord Baelish may still recover,” he tells the woman who he’s named Wardeness in his stead.

 

The Red Wolf of Winterfell look well fed and without fear. She's learned how to keep peace and how to turn someone's love to her own advantage. “Lord Baelish has died and Lord Arryn has come into his majority,” she informs him.

 

In the days that follow he sees things in Winterfell he'd missed upon arriving.

 

The boy-lord of the Vale is young but he is no longer a boy and the Wardeness of the North might be older but she is not old.

 

The Warden of the East seems smitten and bewitched, but is truly only cunning enough to appear the green boy, he’s benefitted from the tutelage of a master in such arts of duplicity, such lessons seem to have only been resumed recently following Lord Baelish's sudden illness and succumbing with new fervor by a more beautiful scholar of the art.

 

He watches the Wardeness of the North share her plate with the Lord of the Vale and finds he must leave the hall before he speaks unfortunately.

 

_*     *     *_

 

“Daenerys will wed you to him if you do not cease this!”

 

His words are loud in the quiet of her near bare rooms. Her eyes slide towards him slowly.

 

“And be seen as ungenerous for it to such a measure that the Vale will rise and call on you to correct such an insult,” she tells him.

 

He looks upon her sadly. “Are you made of schemes now?” He is not surprised, she has shielded herself well from all games she might be used as a piece in.

 

“You would let a woman, who has made you her _whore_ , command one of _your_ bannerman to take a barren widow as his bride? How many would fear a similar fate should they inflict some minor slight or utter an unfavorable word into the wind about your Queen?”

 

He’s silent in the presence of such uncomfortable truths, of how easy it would be for her to sow the dissent needed for men to rise with arms, of something of herself she’s kept hidden from him.

 

He wonders when they ceased being kind to each other.

 

He knows when.

 

“Is that a lie?” There are many things he does not know but he’d been told that before.

 

“No.” She says, her smile is grim from her pile of correspondence. The Wardeness of the North pens her own letters and sets her own seals. “Once, I felt something quicken but I could not suffer it to live, it would have been a beast. Such methods are not always clean, but at least I will never die in childbed.” Her voice is measured and dry like they might be discussing the type of parchment she uses or where she acquires the wax for her seals

 

"Who?"

 

She looks up from under her brow and studies his face for a moment, looking for the duality that comes from spies, her momentary quietude might be soft surprise. "Ramsay Bolton. I thought you knew," she answers finally.

 

His hands are fisted so tightly they ache. "I didn't."

 

"I've always thought the maester would have told you. Their kind are all liars."

 

He'd thought she could no longer hurt him with truths of the past.

 

Kindness would have become something else between them, once. The place where such a nameless thing might have grown has turned to poison soil where nothing can take root.

 

There’s been little and less kindness in her since she fed a man to his own hounds for his crimes against her name and her body and her soul.

 

_*     *     *_

 

 

Winterfell will belong to his sons one day, he learns in the South one golden afternoon.

 

His sons.

 

 _'By who_ ,' he wonders.

 

 

_*     *     *_

 

His body revolts.

 

He rises from the bed of a queen and finds nothing in him to feel badly for it.

 

She looks like any other woman in that stark moment, in the half shadow of so many candles, in the heat of a great keep. The flame turns her silver hair to gold which is closer than it should be to red.

 

“You’re well?” She asks, mirth rising in her tone.

 

“The dark rushes up to meet me, sometimes.”

 

“Is it like that often when you move to task?” She is smirking at him, well met in her bed but he no longer can feel the warmth of her.

 

“No, never.” He feels like an empty jug made of stone, capable of serving a function but easily put away from it if dropped or made to shatter.

 

“Very well,” the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms says. She pulls a bed gown around her limbs and folds into a chair away from the bed and him. It’s as much a dismissal as any words she might chance to speak.

 

“Go North. Jaehaerys and take measure of your lands.”

 

He looks out on the dragon pit where Drogon and Viserion sleep.

 

His wolf paces in colder halls many, many leagues away, a world, a lifetime.

 

“You are terribly sad,” Daenerys Targaryen tells him. “And, you miss the frost.”

 

_*     *     *_

 

She’s the only one who has never asked him what he has seen in the dark.

 

She knows what’s there.

 

She’s felt the yawning pull of the dark maw that seemed so much better once than another night of blood and teeth and hands and the weight of a body on top of hers and screams never answered with concern or with an end.

 

He pities her for such understanding.

 

She wants to spit on his pity.

 

_*    *     *_

 

He’s called her to him by way of a servant, loyal and meek and placed by the Queen in the South to listen and spy on the Red Wolf of Winter. He suspects the woman he called sister already knows of the maid’s true loyalties.

 

She comes to the small room set away from the great hall or guest chambers.

 

“They’ve left.” He says.

 

All the knights and all the blue banners have gone back to the Vale, forced by a tacit command and orders without real purpose in them.

 

“Yes.”

 

“How did you get them to leave?”

 

In her silence the fire cracks, logs splintering and falling into ash.

 

“You lay with him,” he accuses, knowing already. He wishes she would not speak, that she would keep her silence and be shamed by it, she does not keep silent and she is not ashamed.

 

“He wanted me, he would have always wanted me. Now, he’s had me and he can take a bride who will give him sons and he will come North less and less and then, one day, never.”

 

“You would whore yourself for an ally?”

 

He’s no fool, he does understand, truly and he is not so angry as he should be, he understands, his ire is only for show but she has hurt him with her measured indifference.

 

“He’s a mad little boy who has more men than you do, we needed supplies and gold and food. I have no other currency. They don’t sing kind songs about me. I’ve never killed a White Walker or ridden a dragon. Who would you have me whore myself to in order to further your cause?”

 

He knows how fully she considers the necessity of a thing before she does it, he has no answer for her that could stop her from speaking.

 

“I think it’s time for you to leave Winterfell, your grace. The North has many hearths and a King has duties other than seeing to his own wants.” She does not look at him as she sends him away.

 

“What was it that I did to you?” He asks at her back, he suspects he knows, he’s guessed before, in the half-dark of another woman’s bed, in a queen’s bed in the heat of a southern spring.

 

“I held Winterfell. Like you told me to do and I have held the North during your time in the South without a Targaryen army and without a loan from the Iron Bank. I’ve made up the difference by following the example of men I’ve learned from.” She sighs heavily. “I don’t have a sword made of Valyrian steel, Jon. When you learned the sword did someone beat you if you did not take to your lessons well enough?” She asks.

 

He can only nod.

 

“I was beaten too for who my brother was, and my mother and my father. But were you cut and branded and fucked, Jon?” She asks.

 

“I’m sorry.” It is all he might say to her.

 

She does not look sad, she does not look like she feels anything. She looks around them.

 

"I remember this room, There are one-thousand and fifty six stones in the walls of this room. Ramsay Bolton wanted me to count them so I wouldn’t go mad when he would leave me for days. He left for so long once I wished he _would_ come back. And once I promised I would do _anything_ , if I could just have a blanket.”

 

She puts a hand against the stones and shuts her eyes. “You learned how to kill things and I learned other things.” Her eyes open sleepily they are so blue for a moment he is afraid.

 

_*     *     *_

 

The North has its own spies. She might not be the best of them but men come to her, knowing she cannot be their bride and sometimes what men want is not a wife. She is soft and lovely and if she finds her way to such talkative lords in the dark or they find themselves led by some small touch or glance or smile to her own door then it’s always been for the good of the North.

 

There is so much sadness she's known that for a girl who loved songs and stories and true knights is was near unbearable once, now she only wants what can be taken with her own two hands.

 

There is beauty in men with their strength and if she enjoys learning of their family plights, petty concerns, and doubts in their King then who might fault her for it if she can find no blame in herself?

 

_*     *     *_

 

He's a true Targaryen, he suffers as well as any of the songs tell the common folk he should. Noble and valiant and capable of equal cruelty and petty hate.

 

He was the prince of her most foolish dreams when she would stare at her canopy and not yet imagine her family as they were when they were left to rot.

 

He is the prince as she knows princes to truly be, ruinous to all who might want to touch them with naked hands.

 

She’s made him leave, again and again.

 

He goes, and returns knowing that the North has never truly been his home.

 

_*     *     *_

 

The years crawl and again Daenerys Targaryen says: “Go well, then.”

 

He does not fly, he is in no hurry to return but neither is he of any kind of mind or sentiment, ready to spend another night inside the walls of the keep.

 

He leaves Viserion south and the Kingsroad brings wolf dreams again.

 

He sees a woman by the fire, he sees her rise, he watches her remove her gown and loose her plaited hair, the shape of her body below a shift made transparent in the light of the hearth, the floss of her sex a bright flame.

 

He wakes aching for the heat of a woman.

 

_*     *     *_

 

_It was like this: The bastard was a prince, but still a bastard. He went to war and the Wardeness of the North kept his kingdom when he fought and when he won and when he went south. The Bastard Prince and the Silver Queen forged a great pact of peace. And when he came North again many years after he found he had given great insult to the great lady who was once called his sister, The Red Wolf._

_At first, she had thought him dead and then simply selfish and then a fool._

 

_But, there were other things too that made rancor swell between them, for the Wardeness of the North was beautiful and cold and had many suitors and the Bastard Prince Jaehaerys who had a different name when he was her brother left for war in the night with food and gold and men and was gone for a long time and left her with enemies, hunger and a peace to protect._

_*     *     *_

 

He knows what he’s done to make her hate him.

 

Once, she held his face between her palms and pressed her cold lips to his and told him to be well.

 

He’d left.

 

Her ravens went unanswered.

 

She’d heard of his death and of his second rising.

 

And, slowly she grew to hate him for the silence.

 

She'd kissed him again in the crypts when he'd returned and he'd stepped away afraid of himself and of her.

_*     *     *_

 

 

He sees her in the dark of the hall through red eyes.

 

She walks alone.

 

She is always alone it seems.

 

Winterfell is close, he hunts in the wolfswood and tastes the blood in his mouth bursting to life.

 

_*     *     *_

The welcome he receives is terse.

 

She see him, she greets him and she leaves him in the yard to be shown to his rooms by the maester.

 

The wolf he’s left to warm the foot of her bed follows in her wake and all he can feel under the cold he’s never forgotten is a endless wanting to wrap her hair in his hands so he might drag her back to him and make her stand with him again.

 

_*     *     *_

 

In the hour of the wolf he paces, sleepless. She can hear him in the solar, she sees no visitors after she has gone into her chambers.

 

Brienne has told him just such a thing, he still waits.

 

And behind the door she is the fool kept awake by it. Brienne is silent in her concern.

 

_*     *     *_

 

 

The weight of his hands is unexpected, a tether she would yank away from if she were a common kind of woman.

 

There are worse things than being stalled in place by a quick hand. She’s done it to him, a lifetime ago, to try and make him hear her words.

 

She turns and looks down the scant difference between them. It’s always been heady to look down upon men who are not of a height with her. She smiles softly, it is a small smile. “You have come back then? Or have you not left at all?” She asks.

 

“My place is here.”

 

“Is it not enough then? Your dragon and a queen and a keep of your own, songs and a true name?”

 

“No, it’s not enough.”

 

“You want Winterfell too, then? To sleep in my father’s bed and sit in his seat at the high table?”

 

“You’ve chastened me, might we be as we used to?”

 

“When I used to stitch wolves on our clothes and you would stand beside me and wonder how you might undo the damage done to me? They named you King and so you were. You’re not Jon Snow anymore and you don’t belong to Winterfell."

 

“I am _here_.”

 

“You left me with a wolf and ghosts and men who still wanted everything I have, like it’s all something to be taken. My home or my name or my body, I wondered how soon after hearing news of you dying I would have to step off the battlements to avoid a worser fate.”

 

“I don’t know what to say to you or what I might do to undo all of that.”

 

“You can’t unswing a sword.”

 

He leaves again, not long after their parting in dark halls she watches from the gate house before the sun has fully risen and thinks in some ways it’s as if he’s still not finished making the same mistakes.

 

_*   *     *_

 

 

Every part of him is deadened by her stern refusal to even try to mend their past closeness back together.

 

It hurts him.

 

He’d thought nothing could hurt him.

 

She leaves one early morning in the bright haziness of dawn light and does not return by dusk. Brienne is gone too.

 

They’ve left for her other keep, the lands she’s claimed through her widowhood.

 

 _'Take it. It's all you've ever wanted anyway.'_   The notes she's left him reads. The maester greets him as the Lord of Winterfell and King Consort.

 

_*     *     *_

_It was not as it should be and though the dead had been denied, Winter only went deeper._

_There was no melting of snows into Spring beyond the Neck. The North was still a kingdom larger than all others and in the farthest parts of it something rose and flew South._

_*     *     *_

 

There are always stories. The castellan of the Dreadfort is one such story, a loathsome creature, deformed by brutality and as merciless as the heat from the earthen vents between the broken stone.

 

The stories do not make tell of who the man is.

 

It is not a foul creature waiting in the dark. It is only the boy become man that he’d called brother, the boy with broken legs, grown into a man who might warg and _see_ and live the thousand lives of a thousand men. A boy who has kept himself hidden, or dead for the sake of peace, for the sake of a dynasty that could last a thousand years who has become a man in the dark of a near abandoned hall.

 

It is with Bran that he finds Sansa, sitting in the hall of the castle that has been hers since her young widowhood, in the gloom amongst the heavy chairs of a near empty space.

 

He’s followed her.

 

Bran passes no judgement on either of them, he only falls back into visions.

 

Meera Reed shows him to a room and tells him that his brother has been waiting for him for years.

 

It feels that he’s always being shown to rooms many think meant for a King.

 

He does not rest. He finds Sansa readying her horse, making good time at taking pains to run from him again.

 

He tells her he won’t leave again and she wonders aloud what he means by his words. If he means the North, or Winterfell, or just her.

 

She no longer has a choice, she knows what is coming like Bran knows, like he knows and that they must remain North to spare the world a worser fate, already the nights are grow cold again. The Winter had never left, only slept like a great beast under snows and in carved out caves and below deep water.

 

He stays and she does not leave.

 

When they sup, she and him and the quiet daughter of Howland Reed, with their brother still in dream she keeps silent.

 

He goes to her bed and in it feels like he’s being bled to death, he’s cold from the memory of snow leeching his warmth from him. It feels like he’s being stabbed as he put himself inside of her, as she lets him push and push deeper still.

 

It feels like the dark he’s gone into, the dark that’s always been inside of him that he hasn’t faced as he should.

 

All her words feel like the truth, he does not want to be a King, he wants nothing except the dark or anything but it.

 

He goes to her bed but it feels more her will than his own, she’s brought him to it gently and without a word or much more than sharing his plate and offering him more ale.

 

He’s only a man and she opens the door of her chambers like she has been expecting him for a long time.

 

She smells like summer wine and the hearth, the scars left on her have faded to the silver of the moon. Her breasts sit high and bright floss like embers crown her sex. He breaths in the scent of her that's wild and of winter.

 

She keens when he spreads open her sex and tastes the second heart of her body.

 

There's viciousness in him, to be so proud at making her cry out so loudly, to have her fist his hair and demand without words that he never stop, that he use her for his own, that he fill her with his seed.

 

He could do without words from her for a while, tells her so and she meets him on her knees, the stones leave dusky shadows on the backs of her shoulders and then his when she forces him away, pulling him from his boots and breeches to become some storm atop him.

 

_*     *     *_

 

The nights are cold and bitter and there is something inside of him like a wound, fresh and sharp and torn open wide when she comes near to him.

 

She’s taught him, wordlessly, again, that he is no better than other men.

 

He’s had her beg and she’s relented in a way so sincere it can’t be anything but false.

 

He’s had her breathless, a whisper on her mouth in the moment before he takes it into his, swallows it whole, _‘brother_ ’.

 

She doesn’t give pause when he bars the door to the solar, only goes to her knees when he had thought he’d have to goad her towards the floor so they might rut like beasts again.

 

He is surprised at her quiet persistence, fingers opening the placket of his breeches to pull free his cock and put her mouth to it. He spills seed across her tongue and she only wipes her lips against his knee and swallows his bitterness.

 

She’s unmanned so thoroughly he wonders what part of her awful past, alone, in Winterfell when it was filled with men with the hearts and wants of beast, taught her such things.

 

It would discomfit him if he were not so boneless and sated and if her mouth did not taste of him.

 

Her heavy skirts bunch between them, the toes of her boots dragging over the rushes for purchase as he pulls her over him as he settles in his chair, his lap her own throne.

 

He spends too many nights beside her paleness, the dip of her unmarred navel and the back of her hips, the slope of her arse, the well roamed curve of her spine, the deep wounds that have closed, the hidden beatings, the marks of his own lust on her flesh that she accepts so wholly it makes him stir again so completely he wakes her by already being inside of her again.

 

He does not relent, she does not complain.

 

_*     *     *_

She pads softly to her harp and hums the second refrain of Danny Flint’s ballad.

 

“Please, not that.” He sighs and she looks up at him from under the fall of her loosened hair.

 

“Something happy then?”

 

“Please.”

 

She smirks. He wants her again.

 

_*     *     *_

When his once-brother awakens next he calls for him. He goes like it is Bran who is king.

 

He learns the truth of things, not for the first time in his life. There is betrayal in the visions, in the words, in the dreams. He leaves the Dreadfort, riding hard, trying to forget how a woman he’s come to love stood on the battlements, her pain some gentle silent entreaty to the wind.

 

She’s made him love her because it was necessary. He could put his hands around her throat.

 

The snow rises around him and he is stalled, forced to return, forced to face the dark night that has come again.

 

_*     *     *_

 

At the end of it, _in the beginning,_ he is nothing like Eddard Stark.

 

He bleeds his love red upon snow like the fall of her hair.

 

The voice of a boy, a man, rises from the weirwood, he slashes at its face and sap stains its root.

 

His sword glows red, with fire, a dragon screams and its dead eyes turn down to look upon him. He slaughters it like the wall falling down again and suddenly he is Azor Asshai reborn, a red star, a red sword, a dead woman at his feet.

 

Honor, at least, he thinks ashamed and full of his own rotten grief, wounds deeper than love. The dead shatter, again, they fall into the snow and the snow will melt with the True Spring and the Endless Summer.

 

For true now.

 

For most.

 

He wakes in the snow. Her body gone, taken, he thinks, to be brought into the crypts to lie beside empty tombs.

 

He goes further North because there will always be snow if one walks far enough into the North.

 

He no longer feels the cold.

 

The fire of his sword has smoldered and died.

 

The ruins of the Wall crunch beneath his boots and the edge of the world waits for him to find it.

 

_*     *     *_

“You knew.” He accuses her. “You knew this was to come.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You gave me all those night is your bed so you could _buy_ me.”

 

She shrugs.

 

“It’s not the first time such a thing has a happened to you.”

 

“I wish I knew what price I was paying for you.”

 

“Don’t be vulgar, Jon.” He takes his heavy steps closer to grab her by the fur collar and ledge of her hip, he pushes her but does not loosen his hold, pulls her back and she must put hands over his to twist his fingers away,

 

His hands fall but he’s allowed her the choice to refuse him. “They’ll come soon,” she says looking out towards where the Wall fell.

 

“Fuck them.”

 

“We’ll all die.”

 

“Or just you.”

 

She steps back and leaves the space of his shadow, holding herself and trying to feel badly about what’s to come or what she’s done to a man she cares for, she finds nothing. “Just me. That’s how it will be and you can go South after to your real queen. Share her dragons and her bed.”

 

“I won’t.” He shakes his head, trying to do away with the very thought of such a thing.

 

“I won’t wait in Winterfell for the dead to come and kill us in our beds.”

 

“I don’t want this.”

 

She looks out the casement, over the cold dull expanse of a dead season.

 

“You don't have to want it, you must only do it.”

 

And he does.

 

 _'Kill the boy.'_ An old man told him once, another Targaryen.

 

 _'Kill the boy',_ he thinks, _'and the woman and my love and the dragon and the Wall and the winter and myself.'_

 

_*     *     *_

 

_‘…she died in the long winter, the true one, and when she rose she walked North over the ice that had been a wall.’_

 

_*     *     *_

 

She is always somewhere on the edges of the world, hair loosened by the wind and eyes like wight fire, blue and sharp and she knows him.

 

Still, she knows him.

 

He is the man he was always meant to be, again, riding out to meet her in the snow that’s fallen ten feet deep. The Night's King was a man of the Night’s Watch and a Stark and a Targaryen too.

 

He’ll ask her to sing it for him when he meets her again where the North wind begins and kisses her pale blue lips.

 

 


End file.
